Best of the blog – 2010

To help new readers get the background to this blog, and as a filler while I take a blogging break I am posting a series of highlights from the ten different years that I have been blogging. Soon I will have my ten year anniversary. So far I have posted about 2011 and 2012. Here is my review of 2010.

The year began for me in Enfield Cineworld where I would of course spend most Sunday mornings, and many other meetings during the year. I love being rooted in Jubilee Church, it helps keep me sane! Tope’s sermon on prayer, and the prayer of blessing which began it helped set the tone for what would be a busy year.

Just a few days into January my first book, Raised With Christ was launched. Response has been overwhelming to me, as I had no idea how it would be received. The publisher tells me that they are very happy with thesales. What interests me, however, is that perhaps unsurprisingly the total sales are still just a small fraction of the number of blog readers I have. That tells me that many of you have yet to buy the book. You know who you are! Don’t put it off any longer, buy it from Amazon.com today!

During May, I was able to share the rest of my interview with Wayne Grudem. We also had the honor of Matt Chandler coming to Jubilee Church. I got to film an interview and we have preaching sessions as well:

I also attended and live blogged the Dwell 2010 conference and finally met a real friend of the blog, Ed Stetzer. Finally, one of my favorite posts of the whole year was a quote from John Piper on how sentences change lives. Twitter users would be happy!

July was dominated by the Together On A Mission conference. Highlights for me included, inevitably, Terry’s sermons on Ephesians 6 (See talks 1, 2, and 3) and I was surprised and deeply moved when he recommended my book from the stage, having heard him recommend other books for decades. After the conference I shared the first of what would be quite a few videos from Terry Virgo being interviewed by others that I would publish on my blog this year. I recommend you watch as many of them as you can to capture something of the heart of this remarkable man of God. May God continue to use him to inspire many thousands of up and coming leaders.

In November I spent some time in Africa, and was so excited about it that as soon as I got home I took the kids to a Family Safari here in England. It got very interesting, especially when our car overheated for the first time in five years in the bear enclosure! I was clearly in contemplative mood, and eager to jump off the rat race a little when I wrote about The value of being alone. Then later in the month, I urged us all to Check our motives, and shared notes from a sermon entitled “The Glory of Jesus” which was somehow a hard sermon to deliver, but seemed to be associated with the hand of God’s blessing.

December’s blogging was dominated by my efforts to reach out to Arminian’s on the web with an olive branch, which had began in November. When I put together the resultant series, The Arminocalvinist Spectrum, I decided to include some earlier posts which demonstrate that the seeds for this latest post were already there a few years ago.